From pistol shooters to shot putters, every British athlete competing in this summer's Beijing Olympics is being tested for performance-enhancing drugs in the most extensive anti-doping campaign in this country's Olympic history.

Around 1,500 sportsmen and women travelling to China to compete in the Olympic and Paralympic games this August and September are being screened as part of "a no-compromise approach" to stamping out drug cheats.

UK Sport, which controls the country's anti-doping measures, said yesterday it will carry out tests on athletes' blood and urine with no advance notice and mostly out of competition, the time when some athletes use drugs to prepare.

Anti-doping officials are determined to prevent any British competitor from incurring a two-year ban if they breach anti-doping rules, by running an education campaign alongside the testing.

"Every British athlete that goes into the Olympic Village from July 27 will have been tested, educated and there can be no excuse," said Andy Parkinson, acting director of drug-free sport at UK Sport. "We are being tougher than ever and we are saying to every athlete in his country that you are going to be tested."

The crackdown is partly aimed at avoiding international embarrassment in the run-up to London 2012. The 2004 Athens games were badly marred for the hosts when the Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou pulled out before the games because of missed tests. At the same games Hungarian hammer thrower Adrian Annus was stripped of his gold medal after failing to supply a follow-up sample, with the suspicion that samples he had supplied belonged to different athletes suggesting tampering.

Just four years away from the London games, UK Sport is concerned that the attraction to young athletes of performing on their home stage and increasing pressure on them, sometimes from criminal networks peddling performance-enhancing drugs, could lead to doping among 2012 hopefuls. It has launched a "100% Me" campaign whose high-profile ambassadors include the long distance runner Paula Radcliffe. The European and Commonwealth gold medallist has called for new laws to make supplying performance enhancing drugs and encouraging young athletes to take them a criminal offence.

"From August 24 when the Olympic baton is passed to London the eyes of the world will be on us and we need to demonstrate a no-compromise approach to doping," said Parkinson.

UK Sport's goal of Team GB being "100% clean and committed to the true spirit of the Olympic and Paralympic movement" is currently coming under pressure in the courts. Dwain Chambers, the British sprinter and former European 100m champion who was banned from athletics for two years in 2003 after testing positive for the anabolic steroid THG, has been granted an injunction hearing next Wednesday when his legal team will seek a temporary lifting of the British Olympic Association bylaw which bans drugs cheats from ever representing Great Britain at the games.

Yesterday UK Sport opened the doors to the country's only forensic laboratory accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency, in a public demonstration of the science and investigative powers it plans to use to expose drug cheats. Based at the drug control centre at Kings College London, eight scientists test 8,000 samples of athletes' urine and blood every year for a myriad of doping offences. They include steroids and human growth hormones to increase power and strength and EPO and HBOC, natural and syntheric heamoglobin, to boost red blood cell count and increase endurance. Transfusions of the athlete's own or another person's blood are used to boost stamina, as in the case of Alexander Vinokourov, the Kazakh cyclist who was caught during last summer's Tour de France. Diuretics are used to try to disguise anabolic agents and plasma expanders can be used. All are banned.

"We are building an increasingly sophisticated, intelligence-based testing programme and we are one of the pioneers of what is to become the global approach to no advance notice, out of competition testing," said Prof David Cowan, director of the drug control centre. "Put simply, any cheating athlete who thinks they can compete or train in the UK without getting caught should think again."

The laboratory contains freezers holding thousands of athletes' urine samples at -20C. The lab workers do not know the athlete behind each sample and standards of proof have to be high. The facility would lose its licence if it made more than one false positive claim in a year. Drug testing officials believe track and field athletes and cyclists are the most likely to use banned substances. Sprinter Linford Christie was banned for using nandrolone in 1999 following a routine doping test. In March 2005 Mark Lewis-Francis tested positive for cannabis, although he was not banned.

As part of the tougher regime the movement of British athletes is being monitored so they have no excuse for missing drug tests. By updating an internet database, each athlete going to Beijing has to inform UK Sport where they will be for one hour a day, five days a week. A new national anti-doping organisation will also investigate the trade in banned substances, which increasingly involves organised crime. "Our evidence suggests that gangsters are dealing in anabolic steroids and that it has become as lucrative as social drugs," said Parkinson.

How not to get caught

· Use a "Whizzinator": a rubber penis connected to a pouch of clean urine which is incorporated with a specially adapted pair of underpants. The athlete uses the fake when he is asked to produce a sample. Available in white, black and latino skin shades to help fool watching officials. On sale for $155 (£78.37).

· Hide a fake bladder: Athletes at the Athens Olympics in 2004 were caught using a rubber bladder containing a clean sample hidden in their anus. A fine tube runs between the legs and along the penis and the tube is squeezed to release the flow.

· Buy a bottle of synthetic urine: Quick Fix Pour & Go is available online for $29.95. If an anti-doping agent is not watching it can be substituted for your own urine.

· Stop taking drugs a few days before the test: urine analysis can detect banned substances between two and five days after they were taken. Forensic toxicologists can get around this using hair samples which will show doping up to 10 days earlier or carrying out tests well before competition.

· Don't tell the athletes: East German coaches operating during the 1980s would repackage anabolic steroids so their charges would not know what they were taking.